


Out of the Mists

by OlivesAndVermouth (BlueEyedLookalike)



Category: Dungeons & Randomness (Podcast)
Genre: Curse of Strahd, Dealing With Trauma, Gen, If you haven't listened to this series DO IT DO IT DO IT, It doesn't matter that it stopped after 6 episodes, It's wonderful, Patreon Content, Time Loop, WE'RE YOUR GUIDING LIGHT WHETHER IT'S BRIGHT OR NIGHT, this is irrelevant but it needed to be said
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-07-23 20:39:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20014474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueEyedLookalike/pseuds/OlivesAndVermouth
Summary: They woke up. The sensation was the same: lightheadedness, a spiking panic, the uncomfortable feeling of an itch on their skin. But when they opened their eyes, each of them in their turn, they didn’t see a beach. Above them were wooden boards, gently swaying. It dawned on them at different stages, frantically checking their weapons or stock-still staring up at the ceiling: Ta’lor, that’s where they’d been going, a long time ago. Before the nightmare. They all paused, looked for the scars that should be there. The tossing of the waves muddled their thoughts, like a blow to the head, vision refusing to focus. Eventually, they rose.“Hey, uh, glad you made it,” Desmond said to Grace. “Didn’t know if that one was gonna stick.”She gave him a thin smile.





	Out of the Mists

**Author's Note:**

> I'm once again a year late to the party, but that doesn't mean I can't contribute 2k+ words out of the brimming well of my emotions.

They woke up. The sensation was the same: lightheadedness, a spiking panic, the uncomfortable feeling of an itch on their skin. But when they opened their eyes, each of them in their turn, they didn’t see a beach. Above them were wooden boards, gently swaying. It dawned on them at different stages, frantically checking their weapons or stock-still staring up at the ceiling: Ta’lor, that’s where they’d been going, a long time ago. Before the nightmare. They all paused, looked for the scars that should be there. The tossing of the waves muddled their thoughts like a blow to the head, vision refusing to focus. Eventually, they rose.

“Hey, uh, glad you made it,” Desmond said to Grace. “Didn’t know if that one was gonna stick.”

She gave him a thin smile.

They had gathered around Tempest’s bed. The cleric had his hands clasped on his chest and his eyes closed, praying. It was better than most of them expected him to be. Remi would have thought he’d kill himself the moment Strahd couldn’t bring him right back. (“Maybe you should be a cleric of Vecna now,” Remi had joked after maybe their fifth death, and Tempest had broke down in the middle of the street weeping.)

Luna rubbed her temple. “It wasn’t a dream, right? That…that happened.”

“Oh, I would love if it were just a dream,” Remi said.

“It feels like a dream,” Grace said.

“It was not a dream,” Tempest whispered. When their heads swiveled, his eyes were open, gaze sliding steadily between them. “It was a test.”

“A test?” Grace’s brow furrowed.

Tempest closed his eyes once more. “We were never supposed to win.”

“Hmm…” Desmond tapped his chin, focus shifting from the group to the middle distance. “Yeah, y’know, Tempest might be right. It seems like we were put together as a team on purpose, but it doesn’t seem like we were put together to create a _successful_ team.”

“Why would Strahd do that?” Luna asked.

“Uh, wasn’t he trying to find someone to replace him?” Remi added, unsure.

“Yeah.” Desmond nodded. “But that seems flawed in a lot of ways, and he was…”

“An asshole?” Remi suggested.

“Was that the only reason he brought us to Barovia?” Luna asked, on the verge of pulling her hair out.

“If he did—”

Grace interrupted with a booming shout, “Can we stop talking about that monster? I’m _done_ with him.”

Everyone fell quiet. Desmond held out his hand tentatively, and Grace latched onto it, every one of her fingers like a strong, sharp talon. Luna pressed a hand over her mouth and looked down. Remi sniffed. Tempest was silent and still.

It was a month, maybe. Or a few months. Maybe it was a year or two. Beyond, even. They’d died more than five, less than one hundred, who knew beyond that. They found the secrets, did the quests, even the ones that were pointless, and they repeated them if they started over. They tried to talk to Rose and Thorn from every angle, and their reactions were always roughly the same. _Help me. Don’t leave me_. Each time, they found the crypt and laid all the members of the Durst family to rest. They went on. Vallaki, Argynvostholt, Krezk, the Amber Temple. Ravenloft. They helped, they hurt, they learned, they died. Werewolves, curses, vampires, spies, bandits, traps, so many monsters they couldn’t remember them all.

Once when they reset, stripped of the armor they’d found and the friends they’d made and the notes they’d taken and the strength that had built up in their bodies, maybe it was the sixth time or twenty-third, they sat in the dusty den on the first floor of the Durst house, utterly silent. Sitting down, leaning against the wall, they were lost in thought, or too far gone for thought. They knew this house like the twisted dead home it was, familiar yet dreadful, comforting yet horrifying. The fog closed in so thick it kept all the other worries and dangers away, while locking them in with another set. Memories lingered like stains in the walls. It remembered the first disastrous slaughter, and the one after that, so it flickered in the corner of their eyes. But they learned where not to go, what not to do.

Tempest looked at each of them, no babbling or whining or chitchat. “We should rest,” he said.

“Uh, where? _Here?_ ” Remi glanced around, as if waiting for the animated armor from the third floor to come leaping out at him.

Tempest shrugged. “There is food here, and the first two floors are clean of cobwebs. Strahd can wait.”

Desmond was nodding well before Tempest had finished, up and down with such energy his shoulders moved with it, and the rest cracked smiles and murmured agreement. “Sounds like a good change of pace,” Grace said.

For a while, the Durst house was their home. They hung musty blankets and torn-down curtains over the grotesque art on the walls and tore up wooden boards from the third floor for firewood, siince they regenerated within the hour, used pages from those ritual books for kindling. The books didn’t regenerate; no one mourned the loss. They beat out dusty mattresses and dragged them to the clean areas of the house, they threw out the taxidermy from the den to rot outside, they burned the tapestry of the Durst family. They moved everything as they pleased. Paintings were turned upside-down, Rose and Thorn’s toys brought down from upstairs. An afternoon was spent cutting down all the chandeliers because Remi became convinced they were going to fall on one of their heads someday. They dragged the harp and the harpsichord from their room and placed them in the main hall so that throughout the day someone would pass by and pause and play a few notes on one of the instruments. Luna tried her hand at seriously playing them, and they had a few concerts listening to her barely hanging on to a melody, but no matter what they gave her an enthusiastic standing ovation. The food was bland, but the company was good. It became an unspoken rule not to discuss the loop or Strahd or any of the mystery and horror that laid outside the house (or in its basement). They allowed themselves to…forget.

“The Underdark! What’s that like?” Grace asked, leaning forward with a wondering smile towards Remi.

“Uh…dark?” he answered.

“And…?” She gestured him on.

“…Under?”

Or another day, “My dad would _love_ this,” Desmond said, heaving up a book the size of his torso that merely read _ALCHEMY_ in an old, finely detailed script. “He’s such a nerd.”

Luna exchanged a glance with the others and said, “ _He’s_ a nerd?”

“A huge nerd,” he confirmed. He flipped the book open to the middle, the pages so heavy they made a deep _thud_ when they hit the floor, and leaned in to read the tiny print. “My mom’s way cooler. I take after her.”

“Uh-huh,” Luna said drily. Grace stifled a laugh behind her hand, and Desmond nodded, oblivious.

Or at dinner, Remi mumbled through his full mouth, “This almost tastes like real food, Tempest! Is this a cleric thing? It would be weird if it was a Raven Queen thing.”

Tempest shrugged. “Enough seasoning can make anything palatable.”

“Seasoning?!” Grace shrieked, her hand a blur as she waved it at her reddening face. “Tastes like you put fire in it!” She sucked in fast breaths, her face so red it made her auburn hair look dull and brown.

Desmond tried to smile through his grimace; his expression compromised on constipated. “It’s not that bad.”

Tempest frowned in concern. “Did I add too much?”

And all those other days and times.

Not a day had passed on the ship. People greeted them as they always had. Acquaintances they had made started conversations about the weather and the sea and the sailors, talking in a shorthand that had been established before the nightmare that the party had lost. Names and stories and places had been forgotten. They slipped away from those conversations, heads spinning. They asked how many more days were left in the voyage, and strange looks were given back along with “about three weeks.” Apparently the captain had updated the passengers yesterday, and everyone had bonded over the delay and the longing for solid ground.

While Luna paced the ship and Grace slept, Desmond and Remi returned to Tempest’s bed, where the tiefling sat with his hands on his knees, meditative.

“Isn’t a test something you’re supposed to pass?” Remi asked, annoyed. “What’s the point of a test you’re doomed to fail?”

Tempest shook his head. “I do not know. His own sick amusement, I suspect. We never gave up, so he let us keep trying. In his mind, it must have been like watching rats wandering through a maze with no exit. But we killed him. Wherever Ravenloft lies, they are free of him.” He rose to his feet, towering above his two companions, and smiled at both of them. It was a toothy and unfortunately ugly smile but comforting in its familiarity. “I had my reasons for going to Ta’lor, the same as the rest of you, but they can be amended. We are a team now, after all.” And he walked out of the room.

Scratching at his chest, his other arm crossed, Remi was still annoyed, almost glaring at the space Tempest had sat. “You know what I think, Desmond?” The nasal rasp of his voice had hardened, and Desmond stopped staring off at Tempest and turned to the drow, confused. “What’s that, buddy?”

“I don’t think Strahd’s dead.” Abruptly, Remi’s voice quivered, and he glanced around the room as if Strahd’s spies could hear him from some invisible corner. “He’s too powerful to die that easy, and if he brought us there once, what’s stopping him from doing it again? And then just…just…” He shook all over and hugged himself, unable to continue.

Most everything remained the same from loop to loop. The same prisoners were prisoners, and the same dead were dead. After several loops, they began to connect the pieces – she was a half-sister to him, and he was the disguised vampire hunter, and she didn’t know he was alive, and they all thought he was dead. So on and so on and so on.

After they’d figured the best way to get through the Durst house without losing or nearly losing anyone, they would walk again into the village of Barovia as the citizens opened up their doors and went about business as if nothing had happened. It was everyday for them, fear and hiding and moving on.

They went straight to Ismark Kolyana then to Ireena Kolyana at the burgomaster’s mansion where she stood guard over her father’s body, her face dry but her eyes hollow. They took her with them and trained her to fight. Sometimes they hid her in another town, sometimes she was kidnapped by Strahd when their attention was diverted, sometimes she stormed Ravenloft with them. Each time they met anew, they were careful but still overly familiar, as if they had an amnesiac friend who needed to be reminded again and again of past conversations, past skills.

“How is it you know me?” she asked again and again loop after loop. She shifted her weight to her back foot, ready to run at so much as a suspicious twitch.

One of them would smile, look to the others, and say something like, “We have seen much of our future.” Always a rusty half-truth which Ireena interpreted as a powerful ability for divination.

“Does it end well?” she asked. Intrigued and already half trusting them, despite herself.

Someone would sigh. “We don’t know yet.” Once, Grace blustered, “We’ll be just fine!” Three days later, they ran into a nasty ambush and most of the party was torn limb from limb. Luna and Ireena survived for another day before Strahd tracked them down and sent Luna back into the abyss with much smirking and goading and a businesslike dagger twisted in her heart. They were no fun apart, apparently.

Again and again, they woke and the land shuffled back into place. Ireena cried with fresh grief. Problems grew once more like healing bones jarred out of alignment. Again and again, they put it all to rights, all the maddening sameness of the struggle. Someone sat by Ireena and comforted her, someone showed her how to place her feet and hold a sword, someone laughed at the same joke or grimaced at the same story she told. And they saw her blood. They saw her will erased. They saw her stand, hollow-eyed, over her father’s body until that image seemed more real than any of the moments afterwards, inevitable, beyond their control, proving that they were truly mad trying to change it. This would stay the same as all the rest would. Again and again.

“But everything wasn’t the same,” Desmond said. After the initial shock of returning to Theria and regaining his bearings, he had started taking notes of everything he could remember about Barovia. Neither the werewolves nor the vampires acted the way they should have, and there had been were _ravens_ and a _silver_ dragon that could transform into a human of all things, what kind of madness was that? It was as if Barovia functioned within its own rules only, perhaps a quirk of the magical fog. There had not been as much time to research the hows and whys of these differences while in Barovia, and Desmond feared all that knowledge was lost to time. He continued, half-distracted, “The fortune teller never gave us the same fortune twice, and she was always right.”

By his side, Grace didn’t respond. She fussed with the end of her braid and watched the shifting waves. The ship rose, rocked, and fell.

Desmond tapped the page with his pencil and hummed. “If it didn’t stay the same and there was a small level of variation from one attempt to the next, what was the point of it? Was it engineered by Strahd? He might have done it to make it a bit harder on us, but he already thought we were incapable, so if he—”

“Why does it matter?”

The thoughtful ramble ground to a halt like a single gear misaligning and jamming the whole machine. Desmond blinked.

Grace hugged herself and kept her eyes on the waves. Desmond had seen her die, had seen her sob until she couldn’t breathe, had seen her so exhausted she couldn’t walk a straight line, but she’d never looked so small, with her shoulders curled inward, hunched down. “None of it matters, Des.”

“Of course it does!” he said. He slung an arm around her shoulders and squeezed. “We were there for who knows how long, and we died who knows how many times – I really should’ve kept track of that—”

Grace elbowed him in the ribs and he yelped. “That’s the _only_ part that matters.” She shook her head. “We were there, and we died, and the people we met died. You all keep—keep _theorizing_ like it’s some big puzzle. Is Strahd dead? Why did he torture us? Why was Barovia so different than the rest of Theria? There’s no answer. Not one that matters, anyway.” A long sigh shuddered out of her, and her head thunked down on Desmond’s shoulder.

Desmond closed his notebook. They sat together for a long time in silence, listening to the waves and the ship’s crew stomp by them.

A small shaking grew more and more pronounced, Grace shoving her face further against Desmond’s shoulder, but before Desmond could work himself up into a proper concerned panic he realized she was laughing. A gasp of a laugh escaped her throat and she choked out between helpless giggles, “Why the hell did we keep going to the werewolf den? Gods, we were so stupid.”

“They can control their shifting completely! It doesn’t make any sense! What kind of curse is that? I still don’t understand. No one explained it properly.”

“I still can’t believe Tempest convinced them not to kill us the second time we went there.”

“It’s the eyes. They really look deep into your soul.”

She laughed, and Desmond squeezed her shoulders again.

“We’re all sticking together, right? That’s the important part,” Desmond said. “I mean, that’s what you do when you walk into a hostile werewolf den about a dozen times.”

Grace smiled wide at him.

They wandered the ship. Even below deck, even with their eyes closed, it was impossible to forget they were rolling over a vast expanse of water. The shadow of the nightmare unhooked itself from their shoulders one latch at a time like a burdensome cloak as the world moved past them. The undeniable truth of it cleared their head with a deep inhale of sea-scented water. They walked their ways and talked and tried to – to see the beauty in the horror of it all, where the pieces fit, where the blood dried. They ate together in a familiar circle, the world rocking beneath them and making them fall against each other, still a bit off-balance.

“So what do we do now?”

Ta’lor was beautiful and sunny this time of year, it turned out.


End file.
